Narrative:

During the preflight my first officer noticed a problem with the under glare shield lighting on his side of the aircraft. It appeared that the bracket for the 'peanut' lighting on his side was broken and had been repaired with a paper clip. We entered this into the logbook and called maintenance. After 30 minutes of three maintenance personal looking at this light bracket it was decided that they could not quickly fix it. After another 30 minutes pictures were taken; an engineer was consulted and an engineering order was developed to cut and cap the wires and remove the bracket. This was done and the item was deferred. As the first officer and I were reviewing the MEL I noticed the MEL said that you could not use this to defer emergency lighting. I then called the maintenance control desk and asked if this had been checked out. The maintenance control desk said that if an engineer had approved it we were ok. We pushed back and started to taxi. During this time; I continued to think about this and the first officer and I discussed this some more. I then told ground we needed to get out of the taxi flow for a few minutes. Something in distant training told me that I needed to look at this again. We consulted our manuals and found a list of emergency power items. The captain and first officer white floodlights were listed as emergency power lights. We then realized that a circuit breaker on the overhead panel had been pulled to comply with the engineering order. At this point I got a phone patch with dispatch and maintenance. I explained what my thoughts on this were and a different maintenance man asked a few questions and then did a wire trace. He said that this MEL could not be used and with the circuit breaker pulled since some emergency light would be disabled. We returned to the gate; got another aircraft and continued the flight.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: While taxiing for takeoff the flight crew of an MD80 discovered a deferred MEL item was improper.

Narrative: During the preflight my First Officer noticed a problem with the under glare shield lighting on his side of the aircraft. It appeared that the bracket for the 'peanut' lighting on his side was broken and had been repaired with a paper clip. We entered this into the logbook and called maintenance. After 30 minutes of three maintenance personal looking at this light bracket it was decided that they could not quickly fix it. After another 30 minutes pictures were taken; an engineer was consulted and an engineering order was developed to cut and cap the wires and remove the bracket. This was done and the item was deferred. As the First Officer and I were reviewing the MEL I noticed the MEL said that you could not use this to defer emergency lighting. I then called the Maintenance Control Desk and asked if this had been checked out. The Maintenance Control Desk said that if an engineer had approved it we were OK. We pushed back and started to taxi. During this time; I continued to think about this and the First Officer and I discussed this some more. I then told ground we needed to get out of the taxi flow for a few minutes. Something in distant training told me that I needed to look at this again. We consulted our manuals and found a list of emergency power items. The Captain and First Officer white floodlights were listed as emergency power lights. We then realized that a circuit breaker on the overhead panel had been pulled to comply with the engineering order. At this point I got a phone patch with dispatch and maintenance. I explained what my thoughts on this were and a different maintenance man asked a few questions and then did a wire trace. He said that this MEL could not be used and with the circuit breaker pulled since some emergency light would be disabled. We returned to the gate; got another aircraft and continued the flight.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.